Evolution of the Camera Assignment | Essay Help Services

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Camera and photography have evolved and continued to strengthen from the year 1839 all the way to the year 2008. As we reflect on these many changes, think about what cultures have learned through the lens of a camera. Some examples might include Muybridge’s study of motion and how it proved valuable to the fields of medicine, science, and the arts, or Duchenne and Diamond’s psychological and physiological observations of the human condition and their relevance again to these fields. Identify three ways in which the camera has changed the way we view the world. Justify your answers with evidence

Unit 9: Pictorialism, Modernism, and the Photo-Secessionists

As you’ve learned, the Photo-Secessionist movement was launched in the United States by a group of photographers led by Alfred Stieglitz. It was similar to The Linked Ring in London, in that it promoted photography as a fine art in general and Pictorialism in particular. Both The Linked Ring and the Photo-Secessionists believed that in order to elevate photography to “fine art” status, the manipulation of the image in some painterly fashion needed to occur. Some of the methods used to achieve these results were soft focus, a jiggled tripod, glycerin applications to the lens, carbon printing, platinum printing, and gum-bichromate printing.

The Photo-Secessionist movement grew in strength and numbers beginning in 1902 when the group was founded. They were heavily promoted by Stieglitz’s quarterly magazine Camera Work and were regularly showcased in The Little Galleries, which were founded in 1905 for the purpose of introducing America to their work.

1. Gertrude Kasebier: Founding Member of the Photo-Secessionists

Gertrude Kasebier came to photography rather late in life. She was nearing 40 when she replaced her paintbrush with a camera and began earning a living as a professional commercial-portrait photographer. She opened her first portrait studio in New York City in 1897.

She married and had three children, but her marriage proved difficult. Though she never divorced her husband, she and her children led separate lives. Her marriage experience inspired this early photograph titled Yoked and Muzzled-Marriage (Figure 2). In the photograph, Kasebier depicts two young children standing in front of two beasts of burden. The animals are yoked together and are symbolic of the children’s future married state.

Kasebier was fond of children and became famous for her scenes of mother-child relationships. Her focus, like that of Julia Margaret Cameron, was to depict women and mothers as vessels of moral instruction. Her aesthetic was romantic and sentimental, and, like many pictorialists of the time, she drew inspiration from the bible, literature, and other works of art.

Three photographs that illustrate her intentions are Blessed Art Thou among Women (Figure 3), A Christmas Scene (Figure 4), and The Manger (Figure 5). All three photographs highlight mothers as “holy.” Blessed Art Thou among Women accomplishes this through the title and by incorporating the painting in the background of the Annunciation. A Christmas Scene depicts a mother and child silhouetted against a brilliant light attending to a doll that represents the Christ child. The Manger displays woman and mother as divine by recreating a Madonna-like figure clothed in white and bathed in incredible light. The latter of these images was shown in the Philadelphia Salon in 1900 and sold for 100 dollars, which was unheard of for the time.

In order to create the Impressionistic renderings of her subjects, she often manipulated the backgrounds of her gum-bichromate and platinum prints by taking a paint brush to the emulsion and gently moving or removing it until she achieved the desired effect, as seen in Figures 6 – 8.

Another well-known series of photographs made by Kasebier was a group of portraits of Native Americans made between 1898 and 1912. The series began after Kasebier saw a showing of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in New York City. She invited more than 40 Sioux Indians to her studio to make their portraits. Over the next several years, her photographs would evolve into a grouping of portraits that helped to negate stereotypes of Native Americans. Instead of focusing on traditional Native American clothing and customs as Edward Curtis her contemporary was doing, Kasebier sought to focus more on expression and individuality. This often led to a blurred distinction between traditional Native American life and contemporary Native American life.

The video Holy Hills Heart—Santee, provided below, will give you a more comprehensive view of this series of work.

 

Gertrude Kasebier was indeed an important female figure in photography at the turn of the century. She was the first woman to be elected to The Linked Ring, and she was a founding member of the Photo-Secessionists. She photographed many important people of her time, including Rodin (Figure 13), Stieglitz (Figure 14), Chester Beach (Figure 15), and Rose O’Neill (Figure 16), an illustrator and originator of the Kewpie doll.

She also made a series of photographic studies of the New York Painters known as The Eight, exemplified by portraits of Robert Henri (Figure 17), George B. Luks (Figure 18), and Arthur B. Davies (Figure 19).

As Kasebier became more financially successful and independent, her relationship with Alfred Stiegltiz slowly began to deteriorate. What had begun in mutual trust and admiration finally gave way to criticism and harsh accusations. Kasebier disagreed frequently with Stieglitz concerning aesthetic choices but even more so concerning her livelihood as a commercial photographer. Stieglitz felt that Kasebier’s commercial work diminished her ability to remain a “pure” artist untouched by all the cheap commercial output that surrounded the field. She and Stiegltiz parted ways in 1912 when she resigned from the Photo-Secessionists. However, in 1916, she became a founding member of the Pictorial Photographers of America, along with Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. She retired in 1927 and died five years later at age 82.

2. Clarence H. White

Clarence White was an American photographer and another founding member of the Photo-Secessionists. Although a much-celebrated photographer and portraitist, the real legacy of his life was that of teacher.

He was born and raised in Ohio. As a child, he was interested in drawing and painting, but in his late teens and early twenties, he gave up this passion for photography. Although he earned a living as an accountant for a wholesale grocery store, he continued to photograph and made many of his best images during this time.

Like Kasebier, White’s images are romantic, impressionistic, and sentimental. Often, they center on women and children and are set against the rural landscape of Ohio. His photographs celebrate the American middle-class lifestyle, as it existed before World War I.

Both his landscapes and his portraits are informed by Japanese printing styles and by the paintings of James McNeill Whistler, who never associated himself with a particular school of painting.

White’s photographs incorporate light tonalities straying from heavy shadows. Meticulous attention was given to the clothing and props, the posing of his subjects, and the subsequent framing of the image.

Ring Toss (Figure 27) is a photograph that is reminiscent of William Merritt Chase’s painting of the same subject. It takes place in a domestic setting far removed from the modern world and is a celebration of feminine grace. The photograph is printed light orange using the gum-bichromate process and in many ways resembles a pastel drawing.

In 1906, White moved his family to New York. Most historians equate this move with the end of White’s most productive years as a photographer. It seems that his inspiration, which was found in the rural customs and landscape of Ohio, could feed him no more. In 1907, he was hired to teach photography at Columbia University. He quickly made a name for himself as an outstanding professor who encouraged and inspired his students through experimentation rather than focusing solely on the technical and the aesthetics of picture making. Seven years later, in 1914, he founded the Clarence H. White School of Modern Photography. In 1940, the White School of Photography moved to 32 West 74th Street in New York City.

In his later years, his role as a teacher provided history with the next wave of notable photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, Anne Brigman, Dorothea Lange, and Doris Ulman, among others, who were all students of his and attended his school of photography. While White’s photographs remained firmly rooted in Pictorialism, he encouraged his students to embrace the new Modernist’s vision that was beginning to take hold.

By 1912, White’s relationship with Stieglitz was beginning to strain. He, like many others, left the Photo-Secession and founded the Pictorialist Photographers of America in 1917 with Gertrude Kasebier. White died suddenly of an aneurysm in 1925 when he was traveling in Mexico with his students. He was 54 years old. The Clarence H. White School of Photography remained open until 1943 with the help of White’s wife Jane, and others such as Ansel Adams and Beaumont Newhall.

3. Alvin Langdon Coburn

Alvin Langdon Coburn was born into a middle-class family in Boston, Massachusetts in 1882. He was given his first camera at the age of eight, and by the age of eighteen, he was already showing in major exhibitions around the world.

In 1899, Coburn and his mother moved to London. There, he studied with both Edward Steichen and Robert DeMachy. 1899 was also the year in which Coburn’s work was included in two major exhibitions: The New School of American Pictorial Photography, which was curated by his cousin Frederick Holland Day, and The Salon of The Linked Ring.

For the next 10 years, Coburn traveled back and forth between England and the United States. He photographed cities and landscapes, and produced a number of images of London and New York that were printed as photogravure portfolios. Figures 32 – 34 are interesting because they demonstrate Corbun’s mature understanding of composition and light and dark as a very young photographer.

He opened a studio in 1902 located at 384 5th Ave. while studying with Gertrude Kasebier for a year. During this year, he was asked to join the Photo-Secession. The following year, in 1903, Coburn also joined The Linked Ring in London.

Coburn’s portrait work is among his most celebrated today. Not only did Gertrude Kasebier’s influence play an important role in the success of Coburn’s portraits, but his friendship with Bernard Shaw (Figure 36) and the subsequent contacts that were made through Shaw of the most celebrated literary, artistic, and political figures in England certainly helped pave the way for Coburn’s success. One of his most famous portraits made during this time period was of George Bernard Shaw posing nude as Rodin’s The Thinker (Figure 35).

By 1907, Coburn’s photographic career was firmly established. He was only 24 years old at the time. Shaw called him “the greatest photographer in the world.” [1]

His success continued with a one-man show at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in both 1907 and again in 1909. The only other photographer to have achieved two shows at 291 was Edward Steichen.

During 1910 – 1911, Coburn traveled through the western half of the United States, making photographs in both Arizona and California before returning to New York in 1912 to make his last photographs of America. Figures 41 – 43 are examples of how and why he took the next series of images.

His New York series was inspired by his trip west, in which he photographed from great altitudes. “He treated the city as he did nature by giving credence to the literary metaphors that likened New York City to a desert of steel, its skyscrapers to cliffs, and its avenues to canyons.” [2]

These photographs were taken far above the streets of New York. Feeling the influences of Modernism gripping the country, Coburn deliberately abstracted his photographs by pointing his camera straight down and eliminating the horizon line, as in The Octopus (Figure 44). These aerial views flattened the perspective and presented images composed of simple geometric forms. Both the Wools Worth Building (Figure 45) and The House with Many Windows (Figure 46) are prime examples.

When Coburn returned to London in 1913, he was given a one-man show of these images at the Goupil Gallery. The show was titled New York from Its Pinnacles (Figure 47).

Coburn’s fame continued with the publication of his most famous book, Men of Mark (Figure 48), which was published in 1913. The book was composed of 33 photogravure prints of leading artistic and literary figures including Henri Matisse (Figure 49), August Rodin (Figure 50), and William Butler Yeats (Figure 51).

This book was followed by another book published in 1922 titled More Men of Mark. The last image in the book is a self-portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn.

Figure 53, a portrait of the founder of the Vorticist movement, Wyndham Lewis, was taken in the artist’s studio in 1916.

Midway through Coburn’s photographic career, he developed a type of photograph that he referred to as a vortograph. These photographs were the first known examples of purely abstract photographs. They were made with a “hand crafted arrangement of three mirrors surrounding his camera lens.” [3

The mirrors fragmented the subject into unrecognizable planes of light and dark. The English Vorticist movement, which was an offshoot of Cubism, inspired these fully abstracted images. Vorticism was introduced to Coburn by Ezra Pound, whose portrait seen in Figure 61 reveals three overlapping images.

Around 1915, Coburn had become interested in Free Masonry, mysticism, and Druidism. These interests increasingly took precedent over his photographic endeavors until finally, by 1930, Coburn had almost completely withdrawn from photography in favor of mysticism and the occult. He destroyed 15,000 glass and film negatives. He lost interest in life as a photographer. That same year, he gave his entire collection of photography to the Royal Photographic Society. He died in 1966. [4]

[1] Wikipedia, “Alvin Langdon Coburn,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Langdon_Coburn (accessed December 30, 2009).

[2] JSTOR, “The ‘Solar Eye’ of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890 – 1920,” http://www.jstor.org/pss/991837 (accessed December 30, 2009).

[3] Cybermuse, “Alvin Langdon Coburn,” http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/enthusiast/acquisitions/2005-2006/Coburn_text_e.jsp (accessed December 30, 2009).

[4] Wikipeida, “Alvin Langdon Coburn,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Langdon_Coburn (accessed December 30, 2009).

4. Leon Robert Demachy

Robert Demachy was a Frenchman, banker, amateur artist, and photographer. He eventually became a leading figure of Pictorialism in France during the 19th century. He founded the Photo Club of Paris and became a member of both London’s Linked Ring and the American Photo-Secession.

Demachy’s subject matter varied. He was quite comfortable photographing people, street scenes, landscapes, and still life. Figures 61 – 63 are signature images that show Demachy’s desire to wed photography with painting.

His favorite subjects were definitely female; whether they were nude studies or figure studies, formal portraits or informal snapshots, the fact that they were female made all the difference in the world to Demachy. It seemed to be what he was most interested in photographing.

Some of his most famous photographs depict ballerinas in the studio. These are reminiscent of Degas’s paintings of the same subject.

Demachy’s painterly interests are most prevalent in his nude studies. The viewer is aware of the obvious mark making and the scratching away of the emulsion to suggest paint strokes and to throw the figure into relief.

His initial technique involved the use of the gum-bichromate printing process, which he perfected and popularized among many French photographers. The gum-bichromate process is also referred to as photo aquatint, which suggests a photomechanical component to photographic printmaking and also establishes the connection between fine art and photography.

Demachy wrote about his printing process extensively and continued to write about photography in general for years. In fact, during his lifetime, he wrote more than 1,000 articles on the aesthetics and the techniques of manipulated prints. [1]

Demachy eventually abandoned the gum-bichromate printing process and instead took up oil printing. By 1911, he had perfected the modern bromoil process. This technique seemed to attract a more global audience.

For reasons unknown, Demachy gave up making photographs around 1914. However, he did continue to exhibit and to write articles on occasion.

1] Jonathan Green, Camera Work, A Critical Anthology. (NY: Aperture, 1973), 335.

5. Paul Strand

Paul Strand, along with Alfred Stiegltiz and Edward Weston, helped define the new Modern photographic vision of the 20th century. Paul Strand, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in the United States in 1890. He was given his first camera when he was 12 years old.

At the age of 14, he enrolled in the Ethical Culture School and became a student of Lewis Hine. Hine introduced Strand to the Photo-Secessionists and to Alfred Stiegltiz in 1907. Influenced by the Photo-Secessionists and the abstract paintings and sculpture being shown at 291, Strand began experimenting with soft-focus lenses and certain Pictorial printing processes.

By 1915, this method had given way to imagery that was much more sharp focused. His photographs became concerned with three principles: his desire to express the movement of New York, his desire to understand the new developments in painting, and his desire to make street portraits.

In trying to express the movement of New York City, Strand initially focused his attention on slow movements and on the effects of urban living, as seen in images like From the El (Figure 71) and Wall Street (Figure 72). From the El depicts the power of ironwork juxtaposed against the lone figure highlighted at the upper right. In Wall Street, Strand captures the movement of people set against the large geometric rectangles of the building. The people are miniaturized while the building is monumentalized. As he became more comfortable photographing among the streets, the tempo of Strand’s imagery increased, and his compositions became more complex.

The influence of European Modern painters like Picasso, Matisse, and Braque inspired Strand to experiment with building photographs from related shapes, spaces, lines, and patterns. He used items like kitchen bowls, plates, cups, and fruit and arranged them on the porch, experimenting with various ways of framing the subject.

He then began photographing the table, the rocking chair, and whatever else presented itself, abstracting the subjects by focusing on light and shade and how those elements transformed space.

Strand was obsessed with the idea of photographing people in the streets of New York without them being aware that he was doing so. He attached a false lens to his camera and then began shooting in the lower east side of Manhattan at a place known as Five Points. When Strand found a suitable subject, he turned 90 degrees in the other direction so that the fake lens was pointed in the direction that he faced. So he could capture a “more honest” portrait of his subjects when they were not conscious of the camera, he photographed them without them knowing they were being photographed.

The real lens was nestled under his arm, hidden from his subjects. In order to view the subject, Strand could look into his lens hood sideways or take a quick look over his shoulder. [1]

Following the footsteps of his mentor Lewis Hine, Strand made photographs of immigrants, reflecting their poverty and social status among the elite of New York City.

Blind Woman (Figure 81) is one of Strand’s most famous images from this series. A woman stands with a sign hanging from her neck as if she is posing for a mug shot. The sign simply reads, “Blind.” There is a metal plate above the sign with the number 2622. This number grants the woman the right to beg. [2]

The power of Paul Strand’s photographs was in his ability to comment on the subject through various means of abstraction and personal expression. One of the best examples of this is his photograph titled The White Fence (Figure 82).

Most historians agree that the significance of the photograph is the sharp focus on an ordinary fence set against a dark background of out-of-focus buildings. The sharp and graphic quality of the fence, contrasted with the more pictorial background, seems to suggest a moving away from the past and an embracing of modern photographic theories. This photograph references the past while pointing to the present.

Stieglitz felt that Strand was one of the most promising photographers of the 20th century. His photographs were exhibited at 291 in 1916 and were included in the last two editions of Camera Work. Stieglitz made the following comments about Paul Strand’s work:

His work is rooted in the best tradition of photography. His vision is
potential. His work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely upon tricks
of process. In whatever he does there is applied intelligence. In the
history of photography there are but few photographers who, from the
point of view of expression, have really done much work of any
importance. And by importance we mean work that has some relatively
lasting quality, that element which gives all art its real significance…
The work is brutally direct. Devoid of any flim-flams; devoid of
trickery and any ‘ism’, devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant
public … [3]

During the 1920s, Strand became interested in filmmaking. He made Mannahatta (Figure 83) with painter Charles Sheeler in 1921. For the remainder of the 1920s, Strand continued to work as a freelance film photographer, temporarily setting aside his desire to make still images.

Strand’s photography and filmmaking intersected when he moved to Mexico in the early 1930s. He produced approximately 175 photographs of Mexico.

They were republished again in 1967 as photogravures under the title Photographs of Mexico. These images give testament to the landscape, the people, and the architecture Strand encountered in Mexico. [4]

While in Mexico, Strand took the opportunity presented to him by the Mexican government to produce films that would be socially significant. One of his most significant films was released in 1935 under the title Redes. It made its debut in the United States as The Wave in 1937. The film documented the Alvarado fishing village in Mexico, giving particular attention to the economic conditions endured by the fishermen.

Strand continued to work in film until 1943. Afterwards, he took up his still camera once again, making photographs in New England and then in Europe where he spent time in both Italy and Scotland. In the 1960s, Strand traveled through Africa photographing. He died in 1976.

[1] Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History ,“Paul Strand,” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pstd/hd_pstd.htm (accessed December 30, 2009).

[2] Live Auction Talk, “Paul Strand’s Photos: Powerful and Brutal,” http://www.liveauctiontalk.com/free_article_detail.php?article_id=597 (accessed December 30, 2009).

[3] Journey to the Land of the Morning Calm, “Paul Strand,” http://journeysinlandofthemorningcalm.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/paul-strand/ (accessed December 30, 2009).

[4] Project Muse, “The Americans,” http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/the_americas/v063/63.3krippner-martinez.html (December 30, 2009).

6. Eugène Atget

Since current photographic history dictates that the birth of photography occurred in France in the early 1800s, it is only appropriate that a revisit to Paris at the turn of the century is necessary to bring this photographic survey to fruition. There is no better photographer to represent both the past and the future of France’s contributions to photography than Eugène Atget.

Eugène Atgett was born in Bordeaux in 1856. He studied acting and worked with a theatre group in the suburbs of Paris, but his acting abilities proved to be mediocre at best. In 1887, at the age of 40, he abandoned acting due to a recurrent throat infection and began photographing the next year.

Atget worked as a photographer for nearly 30 years, selling most of his photographs between 1898 and 1914. He produced over 10,000 glass-plate negatives and many more prints. Those who purchased his photographs consisted of well-known painters like Man Ray, Matisse, and Picasso. By the late 1890s, he had successfully established a practice in Paris, supplying imagery not only to artists, but also to architects, publishers, and public institutions such as the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

This was also the time Atget became obsessed with cataloguing Paris; its streets, buildings, shop fronts, parks, and from time to time, its people.

Taking his cue from earlier French photographers like Charles Marville and Charles Negre, Atget created images that preserved the city’s past while also focusing his attention on rapidly changing Paris.

He used a large-format camera with hardly any of the modern-day adjustments, and he exposed onto 18 cm x 24 cm glass dry plates. Many of the photographs that he made reveal vignette in the top corners of the images, suggesting that the lens did not give full coverage.

The majority of these urban spaces are deserted. Atget made it a practice to photograph early in the morning before the city became crowded. The lack of people give many of his images a dream-like quality, as did his use of light, especially in his later work, which is more concerned with reflecting mood than describing the place. In photographs like Versailles, Coin de Parc (Figure 95), Parc de Sceaux (Figure 96), and Le Dome, Boulevard Montparnasse (Figure 97), we see a world bathed in extraordinary light. Atget did something most did not attempt to do during this time period, which was to shoot directly toward the light source. He certainly understood exposure and where to place his camera to maximize the dramatic effects of light and shadow.

Atget was concerned with the plight of the working person and the poor as well. He was aware of the growing threat of modernization and the rise of big Paris department stores. [1]

He documented the outskirts of the city where the poor and homeless sought shelter, and he made photographs of prostitutes and the brothels of Paris.

If there was a strictly personal interest in a subject for Atget, it would have to be the images he made of trees. He photographed them his entire career up until his death in 1927. He photographed them at different times of the day and under varying weather conditions. Some he photographed repeatedly as they grew old and became changed by age. One writer has suggested that “the trees he photographed functioned as metaphors for his life appearing as he appeared, feeling as he felt, surviving and functioning just as he did in the environment surrounding him.” [2]

Whether Atget was photographing the landscape, the architecture, or the people of Paris, one must recognize that a large part of his imagery consists of two opposing ideas: the grandiose and the humble, the old and the new, light and shadow. Even his persona of a tramp-like character, naïve about the workings of photography, embodies the duality of his nature and how he approached his subjects.

Atget’s contribution to the history of photography was recognized only after his death in 1927. American photographer Berenice Abbott, who had befriended Atget a few years before his death, helped to raise money to acquire a substantial number of both his negatives and prints. She wrote about his work and promoted it to major museums in the United States for 40 years. Because of such devotion, Abbot is given much credit for Eugène Atget’s rise to fame. Otherwise, his talents and his vision might have escaped history altogether.

[1] Wikipedia, “Eugène Atget,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Atget (accessed December 30, 2009).

[2] Masters of Photography, “Eugène Atget,” http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/atget/atget_articles3.html (accessed December 30, 2009).